Jobs are everything to an economy. Period. My favorite economic axiom! The ultimate demand for real estate is driven by people with money in their pockets – hence the focus on jobs. The demand for almost all real estate is local in nature (forgoing natural resources and geographic factors).

Where robust job growth is found, also occurring typically are strong real estate markets, depending on the relative supply and demand of the respective real estate sector.

The following analyses of job growth across MSAs and Divisions are based on seasonally adjusted data, allowing comparison any one month to all of the others without having to make further statistical adjustments.

So where was job growth the best (and worst) in the past 12-months across the U.S.? The following table shows the top job-growth in the 12-months ending May 2018. These are the best out of 436 total MSAs and Divisions. While Midland Texas posted a blistering-hot 10.92 percent job growth rate, the U.S. was just 1.61 percent.

As always there are the less fortunate. The next table shows those MSAs and Divisions with the greatest percentage job losses.

The players change somewhat when the MSAs and Divisions with the greatest total number of job gains and losses (rather than percentages) are shown. The next two tables show the best gain gainers and those losing the most jobs in the past 12-months. Note the duplicity in some of these. New York City (with 80,000 net new jobs in the past 12-months) is also a subset of the New York-Newark-New Jersey MSA. By seeing both it is obvious that NYC is responsible for two-thirds of the total MSA growth.